This gets to the central problem the GOP has. They have no clear, coherent plan as an alternative.
The GOP’s entire message in the 2008 and 2012 campaigns has been:
“Vote for us! We suck less!”
The GOP needs to end it’s infatuation with Ivy League pinheads who buy into the conventional wisdom in DC:
- that Americans benefit from “free trade.”
- that we can continue to fund the entitlements Medicare and Social Security with the demographic bulge in claimants outweighing those paying taxes to fund these programs.
- that we can continue to fund the military footprint we have
- that we still need troops in Europe so long after WWII
- and in Japan
- and in S. Korea, when S. Korea is playing footsie with the Nork’s under the table.
- that immigration is a positive economic influence on the US economy.
- that a service-based economy is sustainable
- that the Ryan plan will ever balance the budget
- tax breaks for this, that and every other thing for those who have the lobbying power in DC
etc, etc.
There’s nothing wrong with being stupid, but it is unseemly to be proud of being stupid, and the GOP is insanely proud of being stupid on steroids.
What we need are leaders who are going to focus on the #1 problem underlying everything: The level of insane spending. All of it needs to be cut. There are no ‘sacred cows.’ The GOP seems to think that cutting even one dime of the DOD’s budget is tantamount to surrender in whatever war we’re currently flogging in the media. The brutal truth is that the DOD is hugely wasteful. I could cut $100B out of the DOD budget without blinking an eye, just by getting rid of projects that will never see battle.
If a candidate has the intellectual horsepower, (and most of them do not) then we should discuss how we’ve hollowed out the US economy and we’re exporting our wealth to our creditors, and this is a result of systemic trade imbalances that are a result of economic policies put into place in DC.
But... we’re never going to see that. We’re going to do a full-throttle controlled flight into terrain, in large measure due to the GOP failing to get some leadership that is actually fiscally conservative.